Well in my experience as someone who's been very conservative for my entire life, most Trump conservatives are ex-democrats who lean left, but find themselves alienated by a corporate / country-club democratic party, and so have joined the Republicans for some reason... I mean... kind of like Trump himself.
Yeah, that's not the case in the deep red states. The Republican party that's voting for Trump in my state this year is the same Republican party that threw the Tea Party because the Republicans weren't conservative enough. Same leadership, same constituents. And I'm not just talking general numbers, they're literally the same people.
Long-term Republicans are shocked not because their party suddenly and without warning became a populist vehicle but because the populist wave that fled the Democratic party during the civil rights era finally took over the party instead of just voting in their preferred old-school candidates.
